In 2016, Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously to create the Housing Opportunity Fund to help address the shortage of affordable housing in the city, but a year later, council has been unable to come together to decide on a way to put any money into the fund.

“It’s a shortage of over 20,000 units for the lowest income people. It’s a crisis. Everybody knows it’s a crisis,” Celeste Scott, the affordable housing organizer at social justice organization Pittsburgh United, said at a City Council meeting yesterday. “We’re seeing it in Penn Plaza…We see it visibly in the East End, but there are folks in other communities that are facing it that we don’t see as often as the East End communities.”